50 ideas to change science forever: Computing

Wouldn’t it be great if the internet understood what you wanted? It will, and will be studying its human symbionts too, and all at ever-faster speeds

The internet telescope

How the web gets beneath our skin

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The fundamental question of social science, in a nutshell, is this&colon; how can you throw a bunch of people together and end up with not just a bunch of people, but families, companies, markets and societies?

The answer, we have long thought, lies in the interactions between individuals and organisations. Measuring those interactions is at last becoming possible as hundreds of millions of people shift their social and economic activities online – to email and social networking services, search engines and e-commerce sites and, increasingly, smartphones. The net is becoming to social science what the telescope was to astronomy&colon; a device for making a previously invisible universe visible.

We have used email to map out social networks running to hundreds of millions of people, and shown through large-scale experiments how social influence generates hit songs. We have used search queries to predict the box-office revenues of movies or local flu trends, and mined Facebook updates to generate measures of a society’s happiness.

These early successes do not address the “big” problems of social science, such as the origins of economic inequality or religious intolerance. But there is no reason why the internet data revolution should not change our understanding of ourselves, just as the data collected by early astronomers transformed our view of the cosmos. Duncan Watts

Duncan Watts directs the human social dynamics group at Yahoo! Research, New York, and is author of the upcoming book Everything is Obvious (Once You Know the Answer) (Crown, 2011)

Zettaflops

My new computer is zippier

Today’s supercomputers are pretty awesome. But they aren’t half as good as we would wish. Even the world’s most powerful computer, the Cray Jaguar at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee – capable of over 1.7 petaflops, or 1.7 × 1015 calculations per second – lacks the oomph for the most challenging simulations. Dreaming of recreating the universe’s first few seconds, or predicting the planet’s future climate in unparalleled detail? Dream on.

Don’t forget to set the alarm, though. By 2030, ultrafast, low-power chips coupled with high-speed optical connections should have given rise to the zettaflop machine – at an industrious 1021 calculations per second, the equivalent of a trillion present-day PCs. That will be a tipping point in our predictive capabilities, allowing us to model the effects of new drugs on the human body, the response of societies to climate change or how colliding galaxies give birth to new solar systems.

The semantic web

My computer understands me

Web search has its limits. Type a question such as “how many women have won more than one Nobel prize?” into a search engine, and you’ll find the answer, but only after some clicking about and a little bit of reading.

That’s because search engines don’t know what words mean. In simple terms, they rank web pages by how frequently a queried word appears on it and how many popular sites link to them. They don’t know that a Nobel prize is an award and that humans can win awards.

Semantic “metadata” now being infused into the web will help them do just that. A web-page author might tag the word “Nobel prize” with a link to a machine-readable database such as Dbpedia.org. There, “Nobel prize” might be linked to a number of names, each associated with a gender. Couple that with a search engine that has a basic understanding of human sentence structure, and web search might begin to find not just pages, but answers.

Such as, “One&colon; Marie Curie”.

Lifelogging

Digital immortality available now

In 1945, American engineer Vannevar Bush introduced the idea of a person’s memex – “an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory” – that would store, search and retrieve a lifetime’s books, records and communications. Fifty years later, Bill Gates wrote that “someday computers will store everything a person has ever seen and heard”.

That day is now here. Since 2001, Jim Gemmell and I have demonstrated many aspects of complete “lifelogging”, storing letters, papers, photos, videos and voice recordings associated with my life in an annotated and searchable database. Terabyte memory storage coupled with digital cameras, biosensors and GPS means we can now log everything about an individual in real time, from their location to aspects of their physical state such as energy expenditure, heart rate and stress levels.

Utopian vision, or dystopian nightmare? That will depend not least on the laws and norms we establish on privacy. What rights do we have, for example, to record our interactions with others? But lifelogging’s beneficial potential is immense. In 2009, researchers in the UK showed how lifelogging with a time-lapse camera can aid those suffering from memory loss to regain control of their lives (Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, DOI&colon; 10.1136/jnnp.2008.164251).

For social scientists, extensive lifelogging will mean an unprecedented flood of data to further our understanding of human behaviour. For each of us, it could mean a chance for a little, limited immortality. Gordon Bell

Gordon Bell is a computer scientist at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington

Verified software

My computer won’t fail me

Web-browser crashes are annoying, but as far as software malfunctions go, the consequences are mild. With a plane’s autopilot or the control room of a nuclear power station, it’s another matter. As our lives become ever more saturated with computers, how can we know they won’t fail?

Currently, we systematically test all conceivable scenarios under which they might. A better insurance might be logic. A computer program is a sequence of statements and commands that ultimately boil down to logic. Logic can be reduced to mathematical theorems that can be proved correct with an otherwise unattainable certainty.

The mathematical techniques to check software using formal logic have existed since the 1960s, but faster computers, better algorithms and clever theorem-checking programs are now making “verified software” commercially feasible. Software that is logically watertight is also less vulnerable to malicious attack, making this one innovation that could leave us all more secure.